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... And Some Call for a Voice

By JUDITH NEWMAN;

Published: January 19, 1992

When one young actor landed his first speaking role, in Brian De Palma's "Untouchables," he was understandably thrilled. But when he took his girlfriend to see him perform what he considered to be five particularly meaty lines, his reaction was less enthusiastic. There he was on screen, but when his mouth opened, the voice that emerged belonged to some other actor.

Perhaps he shouldn't have been so surprised. As anyone familiar with the plot of the 1952 classic "Singin' in the Rain" knows, silent-screen stars with less-than-perfect voices made the leap into talkies by having their lines spoken by unknowns with more mellifluous tones. Ever since, the movie industry has been using voice doubles -- performers hired to sing or speak for actors on screen, who may be less talented vocally, unavailable or even dead.

Moviegoers may not find it disturbing to discover that actresses like Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn couldn't sing well enough to perform their own numbers in "West Side Story" and "My Fair Lady," respectively, both of which em-ployed Marni Nixon as the vocalist. Ms. Nixon also provided the singing voice for Deborah Kerr in "The King and I." But audiences are often taken aback to learn that, at times, the stars didn't even speak their lines.

Perhaps the most common reason for such substitutions is the nature of the voice in question. The maker of the 1956 film "Around the World in 80 Days," for instance, thought that Shirley Mac Laine's voice was too high and that she spoke too quickly for audience taste; thus, the young actress's entire performance was dubbed.

More recently, when Andie MacDowell was cast in "Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes," it was decided that her character, Jane, was unlikely to have had Ms. MacDowell's Southern-debutante accent. Glenn Close was called in as the voice double.

And for the Australian-made "Mad Max," United States distributors decided that the movie would be accepted here only if the voice of the avenger of the apocalypse, played by the Australian-accented Mel Gibson, sounded American. Total rerecording made it so.

It's rare, however, for voice doubles to dub an entire performance. Normally, they're called in to rerecord a few flubbed lines. The director may not have liked an actor's reading, or the recording quality on location wasn't up to snuff. Ideally, the actor returns to the studio for the post-production technique called looping, which involves screening loops of film and rerecording lines of dialogue, lyrics or sound effects to be incorporated into the footage. But if the performer is busy with another project or simply doesn't want to be bothered, the producer may hire a double.

"This kind of work involves much more than just being good at lip-synching or being a good mimic," says David Sharp, who heads David Sharp's Totally Looped Group, a post-production company in New York. "Your voice must also match the facial movements, even the breathing, of the person on camera."

Mr. Sharp himself has been the voice double for a number of stars, including Dennis Quaid in Mike Nichols's 1990 film "Postcards From the Edge." Mr. Quaid wasn't available at looping time.

Some voice doubles are particularly employable because of their ability to make certain sounds convincingly. Some are great screamers and chokers, while others specialize in laughing, crying or faking orgasm, says John Fedinatz, Mr. Sharp's assistant. "We all have our callings," he observes.

A more urgent reason for hiring a double is that the star has become unavailable -- permanently. When Peter Sellers died in 1980, shortly after filming "The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu," the Los Angeles-based looper Allison Caine held a Sellers sound-alike contest to find someone who could imitate the two characters Sellers played. She ultimately hired two different actors to record the two roles. For "Curse of the Pink Panther" in 1983, the voice of David Niven was partially dubbed by Rich Little because Mr. Niven was ill.

When James Katz, the producer of the restored 1960 film "Spartacus," found lost footage of the gently homoerotic bathtub scene with Tony Curtis and Laurence Olivier, his challenge was to find a voice that could precisely match one of the most famous in the world. "You can't exactly do an open casting call for Olivier impersonators," he notes.

Mr. Katz had heard rumors, however, that Anthony Hopkins had often startled Olivier by sneaking up behind him, then doing an eerily accurate impersonation. A call to the actress Joan Plowright, Olivier's widow, confirmed the rumor; even Olivier had considered Mr. Hopkins the perfect Olivier. Rerecording the five lines of dialogue took three hours.

Posthumous dubbing -- the looping of spoken lines -- is not uncommon. James Dean's final scene in "Giant," a drunken monologue delivered to an empty Texas ballroom, had to be rerecorded by another actor after Dean's death in September 1955, shortly after shooting had been completed. His performance may have been brilliant, but his speech was considered incoherent.

In the post-Milli Vanilli era, the use of voice doubles has come under new scrutiny. Bette Midler successfully sued the advertising agency Young & Rubicam for hiring sound-alike Ula Hedwig to impersonate Ms. Midler singing "Do You Want to Dance?" (a number she popularized in the 1970's) for a Ford Mercury Sable commercial. Young & Rubicam is appealing the case.

In film, voice doubles can also cause conflicts. Before Peter O'Toole's voice became instantly recognizable through "Lawrence of Arabia," he co-starred with Anthony Quinn in a 1959 thriller called "The Savage Innocents," playing a Canadian-born murderer. Nicholas Ray, the director, decided that Mr. O'Toole's velvety British accent wasn't right for the rough-and-tumble role, and he substituted the voice of an unknown actor who sounded like a cross between Clint Eastwood and a gravel pit. Mr. O'Toole was so annoyed he demanded his name be removed from the credits. And it was.

The issue is whether celebrities have rights to their voice as well as their image. The laws governing advertising are hazy, but in film making, the Screen Actors Guild makes it clear: actors have the right to their own voice, and another voice can be substituted only with their permission. The rules don't apply, however, to actors earning less than $475 a day, and this is where the bulk of voice doubling is done.

Just how much is done is a matter for speculation. "Looping is routine, but dubbing is an artistic choice or a technical problem," says Mr. Fedinatz. "It's the sort of thing producers like to keep hush-hush."

Some performers, sensitive to the pitfalls, are as careful about their voices as their visual images. One sultry-voiced star reportedly left a European film set, hopped on the Concorde and, while consuming a hamburger and a Heineken, spent one hour rerecording some of her lines in a New York studio before returning to Europe. Of course, aside from principle, there was the matter of her fee for that hour: a cool $300,000.

Photos: Anthony Hopkins, left (Gemma Levine/Camera Press), delivered Laurence Olivier's lines when "Spartacus" was restored after Olivier died. (Universal Pictures)(pg. 13); David Niven, above left (MGM/UA), had his voice partly dubbed by Rich Little, left (Associated Press), for "Curse of the Pink Panther." Marni Nixon, right (Martha Deane/WOR), sang for Audrey Hepburn, above (Warner Brothers), in "My Fair Lady" and for Deborah Kerr, above right (20th Century Fox) in "The King and I." (pg. 20)